pfSense

This affected myself, on my newly built appliance the gui displayed Intel(R) Celeron(R) N5105 @ 2.00GHz
Current: 2608 MHz, Max: 1996 MHz

It was enough to make me question whether or not the hardware was faulty.

I've had to set the values to 98 in my case to stop the CPU frequency from going crazy, and since doing so my CPU temps have dropped by 6 degrees.

Tested against:

pfSense release:

 23.09.a.20230907.0600

Processor:

Intel Xeon® 4116 2.1GHz

I had limited access to the device with this processor, so I didn't have an opportunity for extended testing. I will leave it in feedback status for another round of testing.

Based on my observation, it appears to be functioning as intended.

I didn't see any gui toggle when testing 23.09-DEVELOPMENT-amd64-20230909-1856, I was testing virtualized but it was seeing 9th gen Intel processor. This would be situated close to powerd settings or tunables?

Jim Pingle wrote in #note-9:

Applied in changeset 93f8b28797a2b618f96589c916128019231f027e.

Tested since first deployment on a i7-1265u using recommended core level control. Tried the range of the power preference with expected results. Frequency change is responsive without having to reboot. Currently operating at level 30 though acceptable performance is achieved at both ends of the slider with this processor. Only notice a degree change in package temperatures.

riva geeza wrote in #note-1:

This affected myself, on my newly built appliance the gui displayed Intel(R) Celeron(R) N5105 @ 2.00GHz
Current: 2608 MHz, Max: 1996 MHz

Not sure if anyone noticed, but the Max clock speed is wrong. For my N100 it shows up as 800MHz and it should be 3.4GHz (and I've seen the N100 hit 3.4GHz but the Max field kept showing 800MHz).

And I don't mean to hijack the Issue here, but are there any talks on exposing the tunable "hw.acpi.cpu.cx_lowest" in some way as well? It seems to be stable for most (if not all?) hardware configurations and seems to allow up to C3/C6/C8 on most (if not all?) Intel platforms that support C-states above C1 (even though "sysctl" reports C3 as the maximum, using Cmax brings my N100 to C8 just fine, it seems).

EDIT: sorry, I had not noticed this is already marked as "Resolved". I'll move this somewhere else!